Khanmigo has THREE-PART accessibility restrictions per user type: (1) Parents/learners: EXCLUSIVELY US, aged 18+ for paid subscription (a 18+ parent may add up to 10 children under 18 to the account), US billing address required. Payment: $4/month or $44/year. (2) Teachers: free access in 44 countries (thanks to Microsoft sponsorship, since 2024) - US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, India, Philippines, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and others. Verification of employment at a K-12 or higher-ed school required. (3) Students in schools/districts: access exclusively via Khanmigo for Districts (paid partnership) - teachers CANNOT grant access directly, only through school administration. User interface: EXCLUSIVELY English (as of July 15, 2026). No support for languages other than EN despite global rollout for teachers.
Khanmigo has three pricing models depending on user type: (1) Parents/learners in the US: $4/month or $44/year (~8 percent annual savings). One parent can add up to 10 children under 18 to the account. (2) K-12 and higher-ed teachers in 44 countries: FREE access thanks to Microsoft sponsorship (since 2024). Educator verification required. (3) Schools and districts: paid implementations via the Khanmigo for Districts programme - exact pricing on request, based on student count. Khan Academy as a nonprofit declares that Khanmigo revenue supports the broader 'free world-class education for everyone' mission - the Khan Academy content library remains 100 percent free.
Khanmigo prioritises student safety - Common Sense Media awarded 4 stars (the highest score for an educational AI in the 2024 ranking). Authentication: standard Khan Academy account (email + password or Google/Facebook OAuth). For users under 18: mandatory via a parent account (parent-managed access), the parent can activate/disable, review conversation transcripts. Model guardrails: system prompts block direct answers (Socratic method enforced), content filtering for children, monitoring of dialogues about self-harm/violence/inappropriate topics. Compliance: COPPA (US for children), FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act - for student data in schools), GDPR for access outside the US (teachers in the EU only).
Backend LLM: Khanmigo uses GPT-4 (since 2023) and probably GPT-5 (since 2025) via the OpenAI API. There is no proprietary model training - everything is done via system prompts, content grounding (RAG on the Khan Academy library), and moderation filters. Content grounding: a key architecture - Khanmigo does NOT answer from model memory but retrieves relevant materials from the Khan Academy content library (math videos, exercises, lessons) and builds an answer from them. This eliminates the hallucinations typical of generic ChatGPT. Access restrictions for children: result from Khan Academy's strategic decision as a nonprofit responsible for safety, NOT from technical limitations - every functionality works on the same GPT-4, but the interface + policy engine for children are restrictive. Ethics Board: Khan Academy created a formal Ethics Board to review AI use cases, including Khanmigo. The Board published 'AI Safe for Learning' principles (publicly available on the blog). Audit and transparency: parents can at any time see the complete conversation history of their children with Khanmigo (functionality on the account dashboard).
